By Ron Cowen
Talk about a baby boom. Using several telescopes ranging from radio to the infrared, astronomers have discovered that a remote galaxy, 12.3 billion light-years away, is churning out 1,000 to 4,000 newborn stars a year.
That makes the galaxy, seen as it appeared just when the cosmos was just 1.3 billion years old, the star-forming champ among galaxies in the early universe. In contrast, the modern Milky Way makes only about 10 new stars a year.
Dubbed Baby Boom, the galaxy is thought to be an amalgam of galaxies that have smashed together, producing the prodigious star formation rate.